How do I reverse my blunderings?

January 26, 2009 4:30 PM

How do I reverse these terminal commands in osx?

I (apparently incoetently) followed the instructions on this blog post. Specifically i did this:

ln -s ~/Library/Fonts ~/.fonts
ln -s ~/Library/Fonts ~/.fonts/sys
ln -s ~/Library/Fonts ~/.fonts/user

Now GIMP doesn't open. I understand exactly as much about these commands as is explained in that post. So how do I fix it?
I assume that re-downloading GIMP would do nothing since I changed something in the osx terminal.

posted by cmoj to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Looks like you created some new symbolic links. You can try: rm -r ~/.fonts
posted by whiskeyspider at 4:40 PM on January 26

Well, to remove the symlinks you created, you would just do this:

rm ~/.fonts
rm ~/.fonts/sys
rm ~/.fonts/user

I don't have these in my OSX home directory, so removing them shouldn't cause any trouble.
Whether or not that fixes GIMP, I can't say.
posted by lholladay at 4:40 PM on January 26

"rm -r ~/.fonts" should do it.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 4:41 PM on January 26

All you did was make a symbolic link. In order to remove it just type this
rm -r ~/.fonts
posted by CZMR at 4:42 PM on January 26

rm -r ~/.fonts will not reverse the last two commands you entered.

and rm ~/.fonts first will make the next two commands error in the other alternative.

Remove them all on one line:

rm ~/.fonts/sys ~/.fonts/user ~/.fonts

If you already tried to rm -r ~/.fonts do:
rm ~/Library/Fonts/sys ~/Library/Fonts/user
posted by moift at 4:47 PM on January 26 [1 favorite]

I started to best answer these, but realized I was just gonna best answer everyone.

GIMP ran after "rm -r ~/.fonts" but i did "rm ~/Library/Fonts/sys ~/Library/Fonts/user" for good measure and it still works.

I love a torrent of useful advice.
posted by cmoj at 4:53 PM on January 26

Looking at that blog post, you kind of mashed two separate, incompatible instructions together. What you should do is at the end:

mkdir ~/.fonts
ln -s /Library/Fonts ~/.fonts/sys
ln -s ~/Library/Fonts ~/.fonts/user

Notice the differences by line number:

1) you are now creating a directory "~/.fonts" instead of a symbolic link to somewhere else.
2) you are linking the system fonts directory (no tilde) to ~/.fonts/sys
3) you are linked the user fonts directory (with tilde) to ~/.fonts/user
posted by sbutler at 4:58 PM on January 26

Incidentally, Gimp probably doesn't start because it's searching through your fonts, but it didn't expect to hit endless recursion:

~/.fonts
~/.fonts/sys
~/.fonts/sys/.fonts
~/.fonts/sys/.fonts/sys
~/.fonts/sys/.fonts/sys/.fonts

etc
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 4:42 AM on January 27